Related

Kept in the basement of the Asiatic Society library, a colonnaded marble
building in Mumbai's colonial heart, is perhaps the Indian financial
capital's least heralded relic: one of the two oldest
surviving manuscripts of Italian poet Dante Alighieri's Divine
Comedy. Its some 450 richly illustrated pages, dating from the 1350s, are
bound and wrapped in red silk. Though the book rarely goes on display,
Society staff insist the medieval text is in excellent condition. It came to
Mumbai in the possession of a 19th century British antiquarian grandee, the
imperially named Mountstuart Elphinstone, and has stayed in the city ever
since despite numerous attempts by the Italian government to repatriate it.
In the 1930s, rumor has it, dictator Benito Mussolini was keen to buff his
fascist pedigree by retrieving the epic and offered the Society one million
pounds for it, a staggering sum at the time. But the Society politely
refused. By doing so, it seemed to say that Mumbai could also be a home for Dante's imagined voyage through the underworld and the
rings of Hell. (See pictures of the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks.)

Echoes of Hell and its abyss of despair resounded from
Mumbai at the end of November, when terrorists rampaged through some of the
city's most storied sites. From the infernal glare of smoke and flame that
wreathed the Taj Mahal Hotel and the nearby Oberoi came harrowing tales of
the demonic cruelty carried out inside. Hotel guests were lined up against
walls and sprayed with machine-gun fire; then, according to some accounts,
the terrorists placed grenades in the mouths of fallen hostages as traps for
pursuing security forces. Hospitals are still filled with the wounded as
social workers grapple with the trauma of those left alive.

The lone surviving gunman, according to police sources, spoke of how, in
the remote jihadi training camps where he was indoctrinated, instructors
would rail against the sinful city of Mumbai, decrying its excess and
materialism and corrosive foreign influences. The worldly aspirations of
Mumbai's diverse millions, they said, would be cowed by a spectacle of fire and
brimstone. In the immediate aftermath, the attackers appeared to have gotten
their way. All hope did seem abandoned amid the din of public grief and fury
with a government many felt incapable of protecting its people.

Mumbaikars, though, did not wallow in their woe. In the past, bouts of
bloody Hindu-Muslim violence followed acts of terrorism. But a sense of
unity, not vindictiveness, permeated the city this time. Mumbai's influential Hindu
right-wing went missing, knowing its brand of extremism wasn't welcome.
Soon after the last shots were fired, the city's leading Muslim clerics
showed their contempt for the act, declaring that the bodies of the
terrorists would not be allowed a proper burial within Mumbai.

"All of India looks to us" read a banner waved outside the Taj Mahal
Hotel a week after the attacks. Tens of thousands of the city's residents
from across its wide spectrum of class and ethnicity massed at the scenes of
the crimes, calling for an end to the incompetence, inefficiency and
corruption many see as India's status quo. In Mumbai, dozens
of citizens' groups have sprung up, aimed at everything from neighborhood
safety to overhauling domestic governance  to borrow from another epic,
to try to make a heaven out of this hell.

Of course, it'll take much more than a few weeks of populist outrage
to challenge the purgatorial murk that defines India's politics as usual, as
well as the grim injustices that shape its stratified society. But it is
this Mumbai that shelters Dante's manuscript: a metropolitan home to
all sorts of stories, still glittering with epic possibility for the
thousands who flock here every year from all corners of this vast country,
including the beggars and garbage collectors and tiffin carriers who
continued with the many Sisyphean struggles of their lot in the days after the attacks. More than half of
the city's populace lives in slums, and most could never dream of dining at
the posh enclaves that came under attack. Yet they all continue to dream the
Mumbai dream.

It was this mythic Mumbai that the terrorists hoped to bring crashing
down, but they failed. By mid-December, wings of the two targeted hotels
reopened to grand receptions and an outpouring of city pride. Despite the
drums of war being sounded in New Delhi and Islamabad, life goes on. A few
days after two terrorists killed 10 patrons at the Leopold Café, a popular
drinking spot, I sat there and watched an elderly carpenter with a ruler and tape take
measurements of the large glass pane, damaged by bullet holes, that fronted the
bar. Onlookers snapped pictures of the poignant
moment of recovery, camera flashes twinkling in the crystalline cracks. At the end of the Inferno, Dante plunges into the icy depths of Hell and beholds
the terror of Satan's face. But he finally emerges  and looks to the
heavens, "to see again the stars."